Being bilingual doesn’t mean someone is qualified to be a translator. Writing is an art, and we all know someone who still hasn’t mastered rudimentary writing in English. How many memes do you see on Facebook about people who cringe when their, they’re, and there are used improperly? Or to, two, and too? There are also extensive English grammatical rules and guidelines to follow, such as whether or not to use the oxford (aka serial) comma. You wouldn’t want a person with bad writing skills to write for you in English, so why trust someone else whose writing skills might be just as bad, but in a different language? Just because someone speaks a language, doesn’t mean they are qualified to be a professional translator in that language. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to translate documents is even worse than using your bilingual friend.
While AI is useful when you are looking up individual words, you still have to approach the translation with caution. It is best to use a web site that is a bilingual dictionary to translate individual words, which gives definitions for its translations. For example, as of this post, Google Translate translates paper jam, when paper gets jammed in a printer, as mermelada de papel, which literally translates as jam (jelly) made from paper. The translation errors get even worse when you add more words and make whole sentences. Asking Google Translate to translate an entire sentence properly is like asking a second grader who struggles with double-digit addition to try and solve a calculus problem – it’s not going to end well.
